The title of this article will come as a surprise only to those who haven’t seen Ubisoft‘s dealings in the area of piracy before. Some of you will remember that back in 2008 the publisher/developer shipped a No-CD crack with a Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 patch. In that case the CD workaround was required for digital-download copies of the game, but rather than doing it properly Ubisoft took a shortcut and used an existing crack off the web.

This more recent case is potentially a lot more serious. Anyone pre-ordering Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood digital deluxe edition gets the bonus of the game’s soundtrack as well as many other goodies. Reddit user plginger opted to purchase the deluxe edition and downloaded the free soundtrack. Then he started looking at the files and noticed something odd which can be seen in the image below:

As you can see, the MP3s seem to have been encoded by someone called arsa13. plginger then did a Google search for the encoder’s name and the game name which turned up the following results:

The only conclusion we, and everyone else looking at these images, can come to is that someone at Ubisoft downloaded this music from a file-sharing network and used them for the soundtrack. Why they would do this is unclear as surely Ubisoft would have the original high-quality sound files available to use.

The only alternative scenario we can think of is the conversion was done by someone legitimately for Ubisoft and they then proceeded to pirate the game with the same username. If that’s the case then someone may be about to lose their job.

This is another embarrassing incident for Ubisoft, but one they are saying is being investigated to figure out what exactly led to these potentially pirate versions of the soundtrack songs shipping as official content.